Today I spent some time checking out the Library of Virginia and Library of Congress Flickr websites. Old photographs are always so interesting. I also enjoyed checking out the user comments attached to photographs. Some seemed well researched and the poster included links to corroborate their statements. While I noticed one man, commenting on a image of Pearl Aufrere, an actress in the 1910s, said, "She is a bit on the heavy side." How does that comment contribute to the historical record? Other than making it painfully clear that our standards of beauty have evolved over time.
Photo of Pearl Aufrere: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2909006357/in/photostream/
I have recently been using Flickr along with Paige and Margaret to create a photo loop for Archives Month and more specifically the Archives Fair to be held at the VHS on October 21st ! The goal of our project was to educate people about the daily work flow and environment of archivists. Using Flickr we have uploaded images created from our own camera, and uploaded images that were scanned from VHS collections, located on our shared drive. I created an account while at home using my Mac and it has been extremely convenient. Margaret and Paige can access the site at the VHS or at home to edit and organize the images with the user ID and password for the account. The process of uploading the photographs was a very simple process and user friendly. I like that you can edit (rotate, crop) the photos once they are loaded onto Flickr. The only concern for uploading large groups of images is using up your allotted space within Flickr. So far we have used 69% of our 100MB space for this month, and we have 44 images loaded. Some of this could have been remedied if I had lowered the photograph quality on my camera so the files were not so large.
As for the mash-ups available on Flickr....I enjoyed looking at the Flickr picker color thingy. It is cool to see all of the objects are used as examples of the color you choose, but I am still not sure I understand the practical uses of the feature. I guess if you really need a sage colored image for some reason that is where you can go!
1 comment:
That's wonderful! Would you mind posting a link to y'all's flickr page so we can see it as well, or is it open only to invites? If so, could I be invited to see?
I found the comments on Pearl's pic to be very interesting, particularly the first comment. Thanks for sharing and for participating!
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